SickBrick is an action-oriented Sci-Fi FPS with vivid graphics and old school gameplay. Destroy hundreds of hostile robots with a wide variety of weapons on a strange alien planet. Jump in a hover-tank and wreak havoc on giant boss enemies. Unravel the story through log files of previous test subjects.

The second (and last) update in our series of news regarding SickBrick's new MegaPatch is about new posteffects inside the game.

You have probably seen effects like these in games built on modern engines like UE3 and CryEngine.
Well NeoAxis is catching up with those big fish by way of adding new eye candy for us developers to work with.

The first posteffect we are going to show you is Depth Of Field.

DOF works by shooting a ray into the object you are pointing your cursor at and making that area sharp while blurring everything else around it (in a subtle way of course) thus simulating human eyes or camera lenses.

Here's an in-engine image to show you what I'm rambling about:

*DOF effect intensified for clearer understanding, in-game it will be more subtle

After DOF we have Light Scattering or God Rays.

This effects simulates the rays a strong light creates when behind an object. It works by zooming in the objects in front of the light and blurring them multiple times to get the wanted effect.
Sadly, you will not see a lot of these in SickBrick since it only has 4 outdoors maps. But maybe you'll probably get a lot more chances in our new game ;)

Map editor image:

Next up is SSAO which creates subtle shadows around close objects:

FXAA which is pretty self-explanatory (better than other AA techniques because it uses less processing power):

The last effect is a subtle but constant one: Vignetting
Used in most today's games, it makes a very subtle dark frame around the corners of the game's screen to give it a more movie-like feel.

Obligatory map editor image:

SickBrick is going to be updated very soon with it's new MegaPatch(TM)* bringing you a slew of improvements and bug fixes.